The thrill of watching the labours of love of the most brilliant film-makers can often lie in watching them take an ingeniously simple concept and seeing where on earth they decide to run with it over the course of a couple of hours.
And so it is with Vincenzo Natali. Splice played at the Glasgow Film Festival as a primetime part of two-day horror and fantasy festival FrightFest - the first day a rousing success, more about the second soon to follow - and it seems set to finally establish him as a major “talent” - not that this was ever in doubt for those who’ve followed his career closely.
His fiendish horror of complexity 1997 sci-fi thriller Cube was a cult favourite, and even if not entirely successful 2003’s Cypher had so many plot twists and turns that it was something akin to a James Bond movie mapped out onto a Rubik’s Cube. However, for whatever reason that marked his last full-length feature until now (a documentary about the making of Terry Gilliam’s Tideland excepted).
Splice seems set to be the film that sees him make a real breakthrough - a screening at the Sundance festival in America saw it reportedly bought up by Matrix producer Joel Silver, who saw the modestly budgeted movie and is apparently gearing up for a big summer release in the US with a $40m print and advertising campaign.
The start of the movie sees two scientists who’ve already successfully spliced types of other less complex DNA mulling over the possibility of introducing the human genome into the mix.
It could be the beginning of a morality play, and though some of those concerns are introduced Natali asserts rationally enough the notion that those who are both naturally inquisitive and talented enough will at some point brush aside general ethical concerns to follow their own curiosities.
So I don’t think it’s giving too much away to reveal that an entirely new being is created, but from there on in it’d be cruel to give away a plotline that manages to at turns horrify, amaze and amuse in some sort of highly potent mix. (I would have said “in equal measure” but I'm not entirely sure what the ratio was, I’ll leave that for the more scientifically minded types to work out.)
As Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) nurture their new arrival Dren the focus quickly shifts from the morality of such scientific dabblings to a skewed examination of parenthood, then onto some other matters entirely. But it does dissect with the main problem with rationally discussing the appropriateness of scientists playing God: the fact that, somewhere along the line there will be pracitioners in those usually hypothetical situations who won't be listening to any established consensus - more than likely because emotions have overruled any pretence at rationality.
There’s definitely echoes of David Cronenberg’s work and in particular his remake of The Fly, though modern techniques allow for a deftness that makes this a modern-day Frankenstein with more of a mischievous glint than that novel’s lumpen film adaptations have ever been afforded.
Indeed, though it can bear those comparisons what’s so intriguing about Splice is how original it feels, as though Natali himself has taken several separate strands and fused them into something that feels entirely fresh. The canny Silver won’t be prepared to pump money into the movie unless he spots the opportunity to nurture a new franchise, and given the ground covered in this ridiculously fun and disturbingly dark movie there’s almost limitless possibilities for future sequels.
It may be a bit much though for those cinema-goers already seduced by Avatar’s Neytiri to find themselves similarly enraptured by Splice’s Dren and then have to adjust to outside reality - indeed, combine the two in their next movie and you could probably solve the problems of a growing population in one fell swoop, as the male half abandoned the wooing of any females to set about furiously on creating their own perfect artificial specimens. Looks like Weird Science might have had it all figured out after all.
